Titanic Suction.

If the Titanic sunk fast enough, would it cause enough suction to pull people down behind it?
My husband and son are arguing this very point right now. I have no idea at all.

Yep. Big time. Even much smaller vessels will do this. No cite offhand. Will try to find one.

BTW, you do realise how many views this thread title is going to get? :smiley:

On Mythbusters they sank a tugboat and observed no significant suction effect. A huge ship like the Titanic might have more of an effect, but it did sink fairly slowly.

Most definitely. I think this was even mentioned in the movie.

Yeah, everything is super-sized these days.

And of course there’s no way that the movie would have made any factual errors. :slight_smile:

I didn’t see that ep but I wouldn’t put much stock in a majority of Mythbusters’ testing methods.

Fair enough, but in this case they had a wetsuit-clad Adam stand on top of the boat as it went down. He’s still alive and kicking.

I saw the Mythbusters episode. Adam was sitting in a wet suit and scuba gear on the rail of the tug, and when they pulled the plug out and the boat sank, he just sort of fell off as he hit the water.

I can imagine that it’s possible to get caught in a stream of water that’s trying to fill cavities of the boat, but I imagine that not many of those would be taking water from the surface.

When Dad’s Navy ship in WWII was sinking, he and the other sailors were told to swim like the dickens to avoid being pulled under. That said, I’ve got to question the science and wonder if it is nothing more than a myth.

As a vessel sinks, it displaces more and more water, at it’s own volume draws closer to the waterline, and internal compartments flood. Once it goes under, there’s no more water to displace. Only as the remnants of air trapped within the structure are released will water enter them, so it’s a near neutral reaction as the ship descends to the sea floor. As such, I fail to see what physical force could create “suction.”

More learned members will shortly be along to point out the errors of my hypothesis. :smiley:

Except that was one of the errors Cameron made. Survivors reported there was absolutely no suction whatsoever. The baker who was on the stern (where Rose and Jack were) rode it down like an elevator and just stepped off. He didn’t even get his head wet. Then he paddled around until he was picked up by one of the collapsables.

Have you never seen a big truck racing down a highway? Paper and trash along the side of the highway can be seen pulled along behind a big vehicle. If you’re stadning close to a subway or a train you can feel it yourself.

As an object moves through fluid the space behind it is constantly being “filled in” by the fluid. That fluid is drawn from around it, so there can be a pulling effect - suction - on objects in that fluid.

That said, I think the “Suction effect” of a sinking ship isn’t really that great. I don’t see how it could be much stronger than the effect of a truck going down a highway. The effect, it seems to me, would certainly be overcome by the bouyancy of a life jacket or a wet suit.

Suction may not be the biggest risk. Sinking ships release huge volumes of trapped air as they go under. The mass of bubble filled water is much less dense which can cause objects that normally float to sink and capsize.

It seems to me that a bigger danger would be getting entangled in all the lines and other junk attached to the ship. As I recall accounts of the Titanic sinking, she went down by the head and when the tilt got quite severe the stern section that was out of the water broke off and sank separately.

Guin has it right. About the time the musical came out (hated the movie!) I did a great deal of reading about the sinking–the fear was there, yes; it was part of the reason many of the lifeboats rowed away so fast–but it didn’t really happen. Few in the water who were picked up reported it; Lightoller who was sucked into one of the gratings but he was blown right off it shortly.

This discussion on the invaluable Encyclopedia Titanica goes into a few of the accounts.

I’ve seen films of WWII ships going down, and like Guin said, suction isn’t something you have to worry about when a ship sinks. My question is: How did the story get started and when did it start?

WAG. When a ship does sink there might very well be eddies (whirlpools) in the area. And Edgar Allen Poe did write that story about the giant whirlpool, Maelstrom off the coast of Norway, that pulls whole ships under.

The depths of the sea are mysterious and very scary, even today. It isn’t surprising that fear generated all sorts of stories.

David is right. No “suction”- just lots of crap to get tangled in. And if it rolls over (not uncommon) there is a very high chance something will catch you and you’ll be pulled down with the ship.

I don’t know about the Titanic, but I have seen film of the of the SMS Svent Istvan, the Austian battleship sunk on June 10, 1918 by an Italian torpedeo boat. Sorry I coudln’t find a movie file on the net, but it would show hundreds of sailors milling about on deck as the ships lists and nobody issues orders to abandon ship until the last possible moment, then it turns turtle and men can clearly be seen trying to swim away from the suction - and (just as sickening as the WTO jumpers if you’ll allow that death captured in B&W is as bad as on color film), failing to do so.